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Are you really listening?

I haven’t had a chance to trek to Dallas and check out Phil Collins‘ the world won’t listen at the DMA and sadly, I doubt I will before the show closes. However, I’m lucky enough to have seen most of Collins’ video works (the film festival I worked with, Cinematexas, had a retrospective, as well as the American premiere, in conjunction with Lora Reynolds Gallery, of the first part of the world won’t listen: elmundo no escuchará in 2005).

Christina Rees, in her review of Collins’ DMA show, is completely right in her "creeping sense that Collins’ goal isn’t as warm and fuzzy as this piece seems to be." It is part of Collins’ project to remain mysterious and terribly calculating in what he lets on and to make you think that he is transparent. A name that Reece forgot to mention when discussing Collins was Andy Warhol, who I see as his most important influence. One of my major references when thinking about the world won’t listen is Warhol’sscreentests.

Meaning is infused into this recording of faces and personalities, of "Superstars" by the context of their creation, selection and presentation. Like Andy, Phil courts ambivalence and confusion about his intentions. Like Andy, Phil exploits to reveal the omnipresence of exploitation.

The choice of locales for his trilogy is a bit more important for their economic and political dimensions than just for being "far flung." The key to decoding the work is in the title: THE WORLD WON’T LISTEN. I’ll let a much better writer than myself explain my point: in an essay on Collins’ video work (up to that point) written for the 2005Cinematexas catalog, Spencer Parsons wrote:

There’s no question that the event is in terrible taste, but then again, good taste is scarcely at work in the living conditions of contemporary Colombia. But if song titles like "Unloveable," and "Half a Person," not to mention the name of the album itself, are enough to spike any pleasure with guilt, witnessing the unbridled thrill of these singers in this context is something else altogether, a joyful fulfillment of desire.

It is a testament to Collins’ talent that he manages to use the tools of international television (anenviable passport, a video camera, an "exotic" background) to attack the awful imperialist ideology that works so hard to isolate us from the unwashed (and exceedingly "brown") masses of the developing world, a necessary ignorance for the hegemonical day to day comfort of living where and how we live. Despite the pop veneer of the world won’t listen and its fantastically bourgeois venues, Collins’ project is incredibly confrontational and political, forcing audiences from developed western nations (and for the most part terminally upper to middle class) to watch and listen to the rest of the world singing the songs that made us smile and the songs that made us cry.